Colloquium in Game Design & Development

Paper presented at the 2013 Games, Learning & Society conference in Madison, Wisconsin, as part of the “Hall of Failure” track. Focused on the problems encountered in developing the Just Press Play achievement system, and the solutions implemented as a result. [PDF of Paper]

University of Trento: “Playful Pedagogy” (May 2013)

Reprise of my April 2013 Bergen talk, presented to members of the “Smart Campus” group at the University of Trento in Italy.

University of Bergen: “Playful Pedagogy” (April 2013)

Invited talk at the University of Bergen in Norway, for faculty, staff, and students associated with the Digital Culture program. Focused on how RIT’s School of Interactive Games & Media has attempted to use elements of play to enhance student engagement, both within the classroom and outside of it.

Google Tech Talks: “The Evolution of Expertise” (November 2007)

2015 Fulbright Grant – Croatia

I have been named as a 2014-15 Fulbright Scholar, and will be returning to RIT’s campus in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in the spring of 2015 to begin developing a new minor in Games & Tourism for students in the hospitality and tourism program there.

Just Press Play

Just Press Play is an achievement system for students in RIT’s School of Interactive Games and Media, intended to engage students, faculty, and staff in a playful way with their educational environments and experiences.

With the generous support of Microsoft Research Connections, we’re working to make the platform available to other educational institutions.

Picture the Impossible

Picture the Impossible was a city-wide alternate reality game (ARG) that I produced in collaboration with the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle. It combined city exploration with online and newspaper games and puzzles.

Bio

Elizabeth Lane Lawley is a professor of Interactive Games & Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), where she is also the director of the Lab for Social Computing in the RIT MAGIC Center. Her current teaching and research interests focus on social computing technologies, including collaborative information creation and retrieval, and social aspects of game design and play.

Professor Lawley received her master’s degree in Library Science from the University of Michigan in 1987. In the early 1990s she worked as a Government and Law Bibliographer at the Library of Congress and then as manager of customer support for Congressional Information Service’s digital product line. In 1992 she founded Internet Training & Consulting Services, which provided training classes and web development services to clients in industry, government, and education throughout the 1990s. She received her doctorate in Information Science from the University of Alabama in 1999.

During the 2005-2006 academic year, and during the summers of 2007 and 2008, she served as a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research (MSR) in Redmond, Washington, and she continues to serve as the organizer of MSR’s annual Social Computing Symposium.